Microsoft now supports WatchGuard’s firewalls with the 11.12 firmware (fireware) for dynamic or route-based VPN. There are two kinds of VPN gateway in Azure: Static / policy-based: 1:1 connections, don’t support point-to-site VPN, or VNet-to-VNet VPN, website-to-VNet VPN, and really only good [...]

I’ve had a bug in Azure bite me in the a$$ every time I’ve run an Azure training course. I thought I’d share it here. The course that I’ve been running recently focuses on VM solutions in a CSP subscription – so it’s all ARM, and the problem might be constrained to CSP subscriptions. [...]

This post will explain how you can quickly understand the new naming standards for Azure VM sizes. My role has given me the opportunity to see how people struggle with picking a series or size of a VM in Azure. Faced with so many options, many people freeze, and never get beyond talking about using [...]

I’ve spent the last week at Microsoft head quarters in Redmond, WA, staying at the nearby Bellevue, WA, with 1000-2000 other MVPs from around the world. I can’t share specifics – the first rule of Summit is that you don’t talk about Summit – but I can tell you that it’s always an [...]

Microsoft’s online backup service, Azure Backup, was recently updated to greatly improve how the first big backup is done to the cloud. These improvements impacted the Azure Backup MARS agent, Microsoft Azure Backup Server, and System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM). I recently recorded a [...]

Microsoft announced late last week that prices will be increasing in the UK from January 1st. This has been expected for a while in the channel after the crash of Sterling versus the Euro and the US Dollar (the currency that Microsoft is based on). FYI, Microsoft has price lists in different [...]

I’ve been playing around with Containers on Windows Server 2016 GA. I can’t say I’m enthralled with Docker being the default interface for Containers now, but I understand Microsoft’s motivation. I needed a way to quickly: Stop all running containers on a host Remove all containers from the [...]

A hurricane is about to blast it’s way up the east coast of the USA, making landfall in south Florida probably early on Friday morning, and working it’s way up to Norfolk, VA, by Sunday morning. We know how much damage these hurricanes can do, especially if tides rise and seawater starts mixing [...]

I’m going to be talking about Azure’s DR-as-a-Service or DR-site-in-the-cloud solution, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) at Future Decoded, a fantastic IT event by Microsoft UK beside London City Airport, on November 1/2. “Remember; when disaster strikes, the time to prepare has passed” , Stephen [...]

Microsoft released news overnight that they have reduced the cost of some Azure virtual machines, effective October 1st. I help price up a lot of Azure IaaS solutions. Quite a few of the VM solutions never go anywhere, and I’m pretty sure that the per-minute/hour costs of the VMs play a big role [...]

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About this Blog

This blog serves 2 purposes. Firstly, I want to share information with other IT pros about the technologies we work with and how to solve problems we often face. I've worked with technologies from the desktop to the server, Active Directory, System Center, security and virtualisation.

Secondly, I use my blog as a notebook. There's so much to learn and remember in our jobs that it's impossible to keep up. By blogging, I have a notebook that I can access from anywhere. It has saved my proverbial many times in the past.

Waiver

Anything you do to your IT infrastructure, applications, services, computer or anything else is 100% down to your own responsibility and liability. Aidan Finn bears no responsibility or liability for anything you do. Please independently confirm anything you read on this blog before doing whatever you decide to do.